Bad enough that Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards continues to fabricate on the issue of climate change; worse, even doing so he can’t placate climate alarmists.
Edwards recently concluded his jet-setting to the United Nations’ climate freakout meeting in Scotland, where sufferers of Climate Derangement Syndrome could bloviate and hyperventilate to their hearts’ content about the alleged imminent disaster headed the world’s way, unless we turned back the clock a few hundred years through excising use of fossil fuels. He contributed to this group therapy session with some boiler plate fibs often heard from this crowd.
“We know that the frequency and severity of these severe weather events [storms and flooding] is increasing. And we know that it’s because of climate change,” he charged. Both statements are false.
But those like Edwards captive to the catastrophic anthropogenic global warming fantasy don’t even know they are lying, delusional as they are and so impervious to rigorous scientific inquiry about the issue. At least they band together in their ignorance.
However, Edwards has found himself unable to share in that comity. His radical stance runs up against reality in Louisiana, where fossil fuel extraction and processing make up a significant portion of the economy. As a result, he has tried to position himself as stumping for policy that promulgates the “transition” to increased renewable source use to the point that greenhouse gas emissions net out to zero within three decades – another fantasy undone by physical reality.
Last month, Edwards crowed about the state had lured a prospective producer of “blue” hydrogen as a means of moving towards renewable energy production using existing plentiful fossil fuels. Except a large number of doubts exist whether the project will exist as the scale imagined, or for any more than a few years, or will come to fruition at all – and a major reason why is the opposition of climate alarmists to the manufacture of blue hydrogen because it subverts the net zero goal.
And the alarmists jumped on him again when, as the conference wound down, he took a side trip to the Yorkshire plant of Drax Biomass. That operation takes wood pellets to generate energy, with its American unit responsible for gathering and shipping these having relocated to Monroe in 2018, gathering largely from Louisiana forests, and ships these from Baton Rouge.
Edwards has stumped for more biomass production, which can replace other fossil fuels, welcoming earlier this year a Drax competitor to Iberia Parish,. Unlike those other forms, theoretically as a tree falls for this use, a new one can be planted to take its place to create a net zero carbon environment.
Except that this kind of accounting mimics Democrat spending bills in Washington that purport to pay for themselves, but only when balancing a decade of revenues with half that interval of spending. Scientists point out this version of biomass would take at least 90 years to balance, if it ever does, as younger trees don’t suck in nearly the amount of carbon as older ones, which then with their burning releases their sequestered carbon. If you can wait a century to get a permanent loop going, it might work, but wait, climate emergency!
In the final analysis, increased biomass production in Louisiana actually works against the net zero goal, because it reduces a sequestration source. (And Drax itself has come under criticism for its claim that its process not only will net to zero, but become net negative.) Edwards seems blissfully unaware that this sabotages his risible 2050 goal of net zero in the heavy fossil fuel-using state.
As long as, of course, Louisiana keeps shipping the pellets rather than burning them for its own residents’ energy – that method costs 150 percent more per unit than the natural gas prevalently used – and it doesn’t drive up the price of wood for Louisiana consumers, this expansion into biomass for suckers elsewhere won’t do the state any genuine harm. All it does is expose more fully Edwards’ posturing that neither pleases climate alarmists nor climate realists.
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